Preface
The essay has two parts. Part One presents an account of my amateur explorations of the history of the English language for four decades off and on. When the Germanic Franks became French, they switched to their synthetic version of Latin. English has a different history. The builders of Stonehenge 5,000 years ago were North African sea-faring herders and traders—originating in the Eastern Mediterranean—who had the run of Great Britain (Albion) and Little Britain (Ireland) for two millennia. Successive waves of immigrants from Europe—first Celts, then Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Vikings, Danes, and Normans—each left their mark on the language as separate registers.
My research has focused on excavating the residue of these invasions in modern English. I have studied how Germanic, Latin-French and latterly ancient Greek registers have taken on class connotations, while regional dialects have been granted inferior social status to those of the dominant Northern European farmers (”English”) who mainly occupy the rich agricultural lowlands of the “home counties” around London. This study of the origins of English is also relevant to the current world crisis, when the West’s grip on the world is weakening, along with the dominant social form of the last of the last century that I call “national capitalism”. But that is another story.
In Part Two, I reveal my personal motives for this investigation. As an upwardly mobile Manchester youth, I began as a specialist in ancient languages. At Cambridge University, I switched to social anthropology and found a ticket for world travel that way. One theme of my nomadic life is the role of Manchester, Lancashire, and northern England in forming me as a would-be world citizen, as opposed to a jingoist. The last section is about economics, a special interest of mine, considered here through its rhetoric. Placing myself in the context of Part One’s general linguistic investigation is thus the focus of Part Two.
Part One
The origins of the British1
The notion of an Indo-European group of languages and societies has come under justified attack in recent decades, but for now we must work with it.2 The first Indo-European speakers to reach the British Isles were the Celts around 700 BC, but Stonehenge—the largest megalithic monument in a diaspora going back to Malta around 4000 BC and spreading out on both sides of the western Mediterranean—was begun 2,000 years before that. By whom? Sea-faring herders and traders from North Africa and originally the eastern Mediterranean, precursors of the Phoenicians later. Copper and tin from Cornwall have been found in Egyptian implements of the first dynasty. Geoffrey of Monmouth, in his twelfth century History of the British Kings (1136), going back nearly two millennia, says that “Stonehenge came from Ireland, but before that it came from Africa”.
The English language has added registers over time, but does not synthesize them, as French does Latin and German. It is most unlikely that this period has disappeared from English, but it has never been studied. The first sentence of the main text on its history is, “English is a Germanic language”. I suspect that its origins belonged to the Semitic language group. The megalith-builders took the calmer passage to the Baltic through the Irish Sea rather than the Atlantic coast. The North Sea, with the Gulf of Thailand, was the last seaway to be flooded after the Ice Age. Stonehenge was built inland on Salisbury Plain—which is rich in stone-age sites—close to the Bristol Channel that divides Wales from Southwest England and guards the entrance to the Irish sea.
Searching for words from original English, I first identified candidates by looking for herding terms of unusual etymology, then words with no attested links to Celtic, Germanic and Romance languages found already in Old or Middle English; eventually some phonemic and morphological regularities emerged. I listed a word as probable on all these grounds; but their range became much wider.
The Indo-European family has no words like ‘Dog’ and ‘Pig’, but they are very early and essential human domesticated animals who share a unique suffix -ca in Old English. Most contemporary words that I have identified for possible inclusion in a putatively original phase are monosyllables of the consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) type. The initial ‘j’ (dj) is common in modern English, but rare outside Slavic languages—jug, job, jaw. ‘Jack’ has the most different meanings of any English word: manual labourer, sailor, object in games, bowling pin, flag, iris, lifting device, rabbit, plug socket, apple hooch, money, masturbate; and many nautical, fishing and hunting terms. Its general meaning is man, fellow. The etymology for ‘straight’ items could be from erect penis. The name is sometimes derived from Jacques which means James, not John.
Most short names conform to the CVC model: Bill for William, Jim for James, Dick for Richard, Bob for Robert, Meg for Margaret, Kit for Catherine, Bess for Elizabeth—all possible hangovers from that original register. ‘Mug’ once and now means face, later a drinking vessel with a face on it; to mug was to frighten victims with faces. ‘Sky’ is usually traced to Old Norse, but the Vikings, like the Normans, were in the same Mediterranean diaspora. ‘Bird’ has only one link to ancient Swedish (ditto), and in Middle English could refer to any young animal, including people—young women in some native circles today. These keywords cannot be found in European dictionaries of synonyms.
I collected a few thousand words over time. The register has its own distinctive sound, as do the Germanic and Latin French registers. The words and speech rhythms appear more strongly in regional dialects of the North and West today. I have long wondered why great British comedians come from Lancashire: George Formby, Gracie Fields, Eric Morecambe.3 The speech of conquered and marginalized peoples often seems funny to the winners. Think of black comedians in the US, indeed of blacking up by whites for a laugh, or the scandal of the English women’s national soccer team, where white coaches used fake Caribbean accents when putting down black players. Now most members of the national team have blonde ponytails.
Thomas Huxley, an eminent Victorian scientist, wrote about the two races that make up the British peoples whom he called xanthochroi (fair-skinned in ancient Greek) and melanochroi (dark-skinned). “The latter was a Mediterranean type, exhibited by many Irishmen, Welshmen and Bretons, by Spaniards, South Italians, Greeks, Armenians, Arabs, and high-caste Brahmins…the result of inter-mixture. It is to the ‘xanthochroi’ and ‘melanochroi’, taken together, that the absurd denomination of ‘Caucasian’ is usually applied.”4
Most British enumeration districts—some 1,200 years after the Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Danish invasions—despite much geographical mobility since, still have 75% or more with ‘A’ blood-type (Northern European farmer stock) or 75% plus ‘O’ (Mediterranean maritime ancestry): a town in north Wales has mainly the same specific blood-type as a Berber town in Morocco. These districts are clustered on a southeast/northwest axis, divided by a line from the Wash to the Bristol Channel. DNA makes this much more precise. I once picked up at a Philadelphia Black Book Fair two 1884 volumes on the “Black British”, published in Edinburgh.5
The food staples of southeast Britain are traditionally pork and wheat/maize, in the north and west sheep and oat/barley. The typical terrains are lowland and upland respectively. The choice of an Irish Sea route to the Baltic over the North Sea—which was only flooded 5,000 years ago, after the ice melted—may rather reflect this racial divergence, which the victorious ‘Whites’ chose to deny. Nationalism papers over such differences; but they were acknowledged by scientific discourse in the heyday of a racist British empire that divided the world’s mixed peoples into White and Black. Whereas most European languages have three terms for race—White, Black and Mixed—English has only two.
This comes from the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland, starting with Dublin, a Viking port belonging to an Irish Sea kingdom based in the Isle of Man. Its previous occupants were protected by a large fence (‘Pale’) when they were not slave-raiding in the Irish countryside—hence the contemporary English expression “beyond the pale”, meaning only two sides, inside and outside the wall. In the United States, the term Black once applied to anyone with 1/128th African ancestry.
The registers of English
To simplify, the main registers of English today are Germanic, Latin French, and ancient Greek. If you wanted to know how Anglo-Saxons were divided on any issue, you counted heads (poll). Later professional adepts moved into Latin French (questionnaire, survey). When politicians and advertisers took up these methods, the bureaucratic elite moved into ancient Greek statistical neologisms—psephology, a branch of demographic analysis. In this way, people with distinctive faces became a selective population, and finally numbers in an abstract science.
The Neapolitan philosopher, Giambattista Vico in his Principles of the New Science Concerning the Common Nature of Nations (1744) pointed out that Latin memoria at first meant both memory and imagination—young children are born with the ability to store vivid images recalled from live experience. Adults learn to outsource memory to external engines. Likewise, new civilizations are made by poets drawing on various cultural elements that existed before. The Roman Empire introduced the new word fantasia for the work of paid entertainers. This was the seed of a decline and fall analogous to what happens to mortal humans in the life cycle. For Vico unlike Aristotle, beginnings mattered more than ends which are inevitable. Incidentally, ‘money’ comes from the Roman mint in the temple of Juno Moneta, the goddess of memory and mother of the muses, guardians of the arts of civilization. Hence my book, The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World (2000).
There have been three main waves of the bureaucratization of English—when the modern state was consolidated in the 17th century, the Victorian world empire of the 19th century, and its American successor in the 20th century. From medieval times, the professional middle-class agents of the powers—priests, lawyers, academics, doctors—used Latin to confuse ordinary working people whose speech was mainly Germanic or Celtic. The upper classes mumbled in their fashionable argot learned at court and later at places like Eton College, since they didn’t want the rest to understand what they were saying.
I developed for my personal amusement a game where the question is in Germanic English and the answer repeats the question in Latin-French, because it sounds posher that way. Thus, a famous American TV journalist interviews a Black football star: “Do you think you will win the game, Bubba?” The short answer is “yes”, but the reply comes out as “Well, Howard, my colleagues and I are confident of victory.” “Posh” sounds popular and has penetrated the working class by now: “Ooh, don’t he talk posh!” But it was a Victorian neologism of the privileged classes referring to tickets “Port Out, Starboard Home”, when sailing back and to between Britain and India. Cabins facing North when going out and coming back home were shady and cooler than the sunny South, therefore reserved for government officers and businessmen who could afford the higher prices.
Part Two
“I come from Manchester”
When I was forming a new social sciences graduate school for the anglophone Caribbean in Jamaica during 1986-88, a student once blurted out “You English grew rich by exploiting our slave ancestors.” I should have been more reserved, but I could not help myself: “First, I am not English, I am from Manchester; and my Celtic ancestors contributed far more than yours to English wealth for a thousand years.” The story of my family’s migration from Northern Ireland in the late nineteenth century is told in Chapter 4 of my Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022). I explored the influence of my native city on my formation as a globetrotting anthropologist in Manchester on my mind: a memoir, an essay in ten episodes (2003).
My first book was a historical synthesis of regional literature, The Political Economy of West African Agriculture (1982). It started out as a report for the US Agency for International Development. I wrote it in three weeks while teaching at Ann Arbor, Michigan; it took me another month to add the scholarly apparatus to Cambridge University Press’ satisfaction. Afterwards, I felt that I knew far more about African history than of my local origins; in time I built up a sketch of Lancashire’s development since the industrial revolution that we launched. This was mainly when living in the Rossendale Valley while teaching at Manchester University in the early 1970s, and later visiting the same place as my then partner’s home in the 1990s. The following passage is adapted from both the Manchester memoir and a review article on a book about India’s industrial labour.
I knew more about West Africa than I did about Manchester’s history; I set out to rectify the omission. It was easier to get away with writing about Africa’s history, where the sources are scarce, than British history where an army of historians could demonstrate my errors. I wanted to move beyond Africa as a regional object of study by western scholars to its place in the Atlantic history of slavery, colonial empire, apartheid, and unequal development. I delved into the place of Lancashire in nineteenth century social history. I found Friedrich Engels’ book on Manchester in 1844 thrilling and took friends and visitors on an “Engels tour” of the inner city.6 I knew none of this when I was growing up in Old Trafford and attending Manchester Grammar School. Ever since, I have run classical social theory through what I learned of Lancashire’s economy then and later.
In The Communist Manifesto (1845), Marx and Engels claimed that the industrial working class (‘proletariat’) would overthrow capitalism. G.W.F. Hegel, in The Philosophy of Right (1821), found that capitalism, when left to its own devices, generated mindless work and dire poverty. He saw no way around its ability to generate wealth, however, and thought its contradictions could be contained by the modern state. A “universal class” of university-trained bureaucrats would manage the process in the interest of the citizen body.
Marx and Engels saw only one candidate for such a class, the new factory workers. Industrial capitalism would render the state obsolete; the factory system, by developing sweatshops or adding machines to human labour, was concentrating workers in new urban centres. They could offset the power of the owners’ money there by organizing more effectively than peasants locked up in the countryside. The workers, in addition to the potential of combination, had no property save their labour power. Small proprietors—the “petty bourgeoisie”, along with the “dangerous classes” who lacked stable jobs— formed separate classes. The proletariat would represent society.
A “cotton famine” beset Lancashire in 1861-64 when the Union navy’s blockade of southern ports in the American civil war dried up material supplies, causing massive unemployment. The owners petitioned parliament to send battleships to relieve the blockade; the workers held demonstrations supporting the North in the war and the freedom of labour. People died, but fewer than if workers only had their own labour to sell. What sustained them?
Lancashire’s industrial workforce were substantially migrants from homelands that had largely avoided feudalism—Ireland, west Scotland, and north Wales—supplementing the former artisans of the water-driven textile industry in the Pennine hills. Lancashire has a wild hilly landscape to set against its “dark satanic mills” in the valleys (William Blake). I once took a French Marxist on top of the moors overlooking Oldham’s smog and Manchester’s beyond. He loved being above it all in that bracing wind; “I never knew—they never told us”, he said. The buoyancy that Marx and Engels noted in Lancashire could have had several causes. Working in a factory was the least likely.
Beatrice Webb was a cooperative socialist who, with her husband Sidney, helped found a center-left think tank, the Fabian Society. She reports her shock when she left London as a teenager to visit northern relatives near Manchester founding a new working-class civilization there.7 These were made, she wrote, by the workers themselves: the chapel, union and co-op. Each addressed both collective and individual interests: the chapel congregation was offset by protestant individualism; solidarity at work was based on private ownership of tools; and combination in a social market assumed private property in commodities.
Studies of the workplace must also take in the institutions people devise for themselves outside it. The “informal economy” has long been a strategy of Lancashire’s inhabitants, before the industrial revolution and still today. In Rossendale this included one-man part-time strip-mining and quarrying, transport and catering for pilgrims, hunting, keeping animals, market gardening, and thieving; coal mining was officially but not effectively abolished by nationalization after 1945. These activities helped working families to survive downswings in the business cycle. Marx and Engels, along with the political economists, missed it all. They clung to a contrast between working-class collectivism and petty bourgeois individualism that was never there.
If human nature requires us to be individual and social at once—the central message of Self in the World—Marx and Engels’ class analysis falls immediately. The lines demarcating the proletariat, petty bourgeoisie, and lumpenproletariat dissolve. When people combine on their own terms, formal boundaries are never absolute. Napoleon was right: the British are a “nation of shopkeepers”, addicted to fair play in exchange and social conformity, exemplified by orderly queuing. A huge population has always moved up and down between the upper-working and lower-middle classes. My own family provides much evidence of this over four generations.
This—as well as growing up in an inner-city poor area—was why I was open to what I found in Accra’s slums, once I was blocked from studying the politics of northern migrants because Ghana was a police state, and no-one would talk to me about that. I witnessed the life of the street economy and decided to make that my research topic. I stayed there for more than two years, living off the proceeds of criminal enterprise after my first research grant expired.
The Pan-African Federation was founded in Manchester in 1944 by African and Coloured peoples. Delegates came from Kenya, Sierra Leone, the Gold Coast, and other colonies. Its aims were “to promote the well-being and unity of African peoples and peoples of African descent throughout the world; to demand self-determination and independence of African peoples and other subject races; to secure equality of civil rights for African peoples and an end to racial discrimination; and co-operation between African peoples and others who share our aspirations.”
Africa succumbed to the last phase of the European land grab. The Pan-African movement was the largest and most diverse in the world during the first half of the last century; it aimed to restore control of their land to Africans. Manchester hosted the Fifth Pan-African Congress in October 1945. It was organized by George Padmore, a Trinidadian Marxist and partner of C.L.R. James with others in the International African Service Bureau. The ninety delegates included Jomo Kenyatta, W.E.B. Dubois, Obafemi Awolowo, and Hastings Banda. There were 33 delegates from the Caribbean. The British newspapers ignored the event. The movement’s main intellectual drivers came from the New World: Du Bois, James, and Fanon (with Gandhi); each provided visions of a postcolonial democratic world order. Why was Manchester chosen to launch the Pan-African Federation?
Marx and Engels based their revolutionary vision on their experience of Manchester, without understanding where it came from. Popular literary and philosophical societies (‘Lit & Phil’), Mechanical Institutes, Friendly Societies, and the Cooperative, Chartist labour, and Anti-slavery movements—the abolitionist leader, Thomas Clarkson was thrown into the sea at Bristol and Liverpool, but 10,000 signed his petition in Manchester—were pioneered there in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. During Covid-19 in 2020-22, Marcus Rashford—a native Black Manchester United footballer—campaigned against the Tory government for free schoolchildren’s meals in the holidays and won. Andy Burnham, Greater Manchester’s mayor and a former Labour minister, was the most vocal critic of the Tories’ mismanagement of the pandemic; and now, with other big city mayors, leads the movement for political devolution and proportional representation in England, as opposed to the national ‘first past the post’ system.
There is a history to all this involving both the middle classes and workers. Manchester launched the Anti-Corn law movement for international free trade—against the military landlords’ domestic monopoly of food supplies. Bosses and their workers were united by liberal economics in wanting to reduce high food prices. Both still speak with the same local accent, as in the Celtic periphery, but unlike the English heartlands. In Lancashire and the New Liberalism (1971), Peter Clarke showed that the Liberal governments of Asquith and Lloyd-George—which launched the welfare state before the First World War—relied heavily on Lancashire for their national electoral victories from the 1880s. The county had a quarter of England and Wales 12 million then; one million of these were born in Ireland, and the previous Liberals’ leader, William Gladstone promised Irish home rule.
It does not end there. James Prescott Joule—a physicist, mathematician, and brewer born in Manchester’s poorer twin city, Salford—studied the nature of heat and its relationship to mechanical work. His discoveries led to the ‘law of conservation of energy’ and the ‘first law of thermodynamics'. Brewing beer—drinking it was the working classes’ main leisure activity when they had money to spend—brought the economy and science together in the 19th century. East Anglian brewers also funded pioneering research on plant genetics at Cambridge University.
The rhetoric of economics
For 1500 years, Aristotle was Christianity’s favourite philosopher. He invented the word “economy” (oikonomia) as household self-sufficiency, when his target audience were the owners of manorial estates with their slaves, tied peasants, herds, orchards, and extensive views. Aristotle opposed this model of frugality to “business” (chrematistike), a low occupation of sharps and crooks typical of the trading cities. In fact, he was Alexander the Great’s tutor and guru to the Macedonian cavalry who overran Athens. Their Hellenistic empire, followed by the Roman version, established landed warfare’s hegemony over water-borne trade for millennia, including our own. They made the Eurasian world safer for warrior landowners after a millennium of political conflict for supremacy between money and landed power in the ancient Mediterranean, operating under the labels of "democracy” and “aristocracy” respectively.
For the next two millennia, economy was above all “domestic”—an upper-class term for controlling the servants—for those who could afford them. As late as the early nineteenth century, Jane Austen could refer to an incompetent “lady of the house” as a “poor economist”. When Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), launched “political economy” as a synonym for bourgeois interests, he had in mind making markets forever internal to the functioning of society, rather than being kept marginal hitherto. It seemed then that the capitalists were pushing the traditional enforcers into the dustbin of history with their industrial revolution; but things worked out differently.
By the 1860s, American, European and Japanese capitalists discovered that they needed their former class enemy’s fighting and crowd control skills to subdue the burgeoning city populations generated by the machine revolution, and especially for taking over the world with their colonial empires. The result was a series of mid-century political revolutions in the leading powers of the next century, based on a merger between government and business—nation-states and industrial capitalism.
By 1900, this had sustained a bureaucratic revolution enabling mass production and consumption at home. Hegel had already envisaged this; but he has never been credited with inventing the dominant modern social form, national capitalism. This is because Karl Marx did not acknowledge his debt to John Locke as the source for his own ‘labor theory of value’—having conceived of the middle-class revolution and national capitalism linked to empire in the seventeenth century. He also got most of his philosophy from Hegel, whom he dismissed as an idealist old fogy. Marx’s critique of political economy in Capital (1867), however, did encourage the political economists to ditch the label in favour of ‘economics’ with its echoes of the natural sciences; it rhymes with physics and mathematics.
While teaching in Manchester, I moonlighted for The Economist, writing know-all anonymous reports on West Africa. I learned there what I call ‘economese’—how to sound like a confident economist without formal training in the discipline. Mastery of this dialect helped me to converse with development economists, leading to my idea of an informal economy being taken up by the World Bank, International Labor Office, and other multilateral institutions as cover for their plan to dismantle postwar state capitalism. Their preferred method was to impose ‘structural adjustment policies’ on national governments in the 1980s, so that capital could move anywhere in the world without hindrance.
At Yale University in the late 1970s, I conducted a participant observation study of its economics department seminars. If the floor discussion became too casual, someone would restore intellectual order by leaping up to write algebraic equations and geometrical curves on the blackboard. After a while, a senior member with impeccable academic credentials would butt in with, “What’s your story, Bob?” The lower echelons in the audience then got to speak in barber-shop English for a while.
Once, after an invited lecture by a “Nobel” (Bank of Sweden) prize winner, I found myself by accident in a small room with four senior economists, including three Nobel prize-winners. I was there for the drinks, but these were elsewhere for the plebs, and no-one paid attention to me—I was an informal adviser on internal promotions and external relations for the great James Tobin, the head of department. I forget the exact lecture topic now, something like “the standard rate of profit.” Jim Tobin asked our visitor Arthur Okun, after a period of chat when they let their hair down, to come clean concerning his real thoughts on the topic. Okun replied in Germanic English that the standard rate of profit was just “costs plus a markup that they think they can get away with”. Only I found this remarkable, and I stayed quiet.
Adam Smith gave four lecture courses at Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities from the 1740s to the 80s, in a series one after the other: on rhetoric and belles lettres; jurisprudence; moral philosophy; and political economy. In his will, he ordered the lecture notes for the first two courses to be destroyed. Perhaps this was because their publication would reveal the literary artifice and legal realpolitik behind The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. For the general argument of this section, see ‘The persuasive power of money’ and, for Adam Smith in particular, pages 20-21.
Notes:
1 This section is based on K. Hart Self in the World: Connecting Life’s Extremes (2022: 232-4).
2 C. Renfrew, Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins (1987).
3 Peter Chelsom’s movie, Funny Bones (1995), explores the British, American and French roots of comedy in Lancashire’s prime seaside resort, Blackpool. I recommend it.
4 T. Huxley, On the geographical distribution of the chief modifications of mankind, Journal of the Ethnological Society of London (1870).
5 David Mac Ritchie, Ancient and Modern Britons, 2 vols (1985 [1884]).
6 The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (2009 [1845]).
7 My Apprenticeship (1980 [1926]).